great week :)

It was great to show someone that I love from home what my life has been like here...




We did a whole bunch!

• Lookout
• El progresso which is some dead beat town and I'm not exactly sure why it's tourist area
• La soledad for the view and we ate pumarosas :)
• El junco for the glacier lake
• La galapaguera for the giant land tortoises
• Puerto chino and played frisbee and body surfed and got attacked by flies and swam out to the boobies
• La loberia and swam with the giant sea turtles
• Corola and swam with the smaller sea turtles
• Tijeretas
• Leon dormido and snorkeled with the sharks again (sorry mom...)
• Isla lobos and swam with baby lobos
• Puerto grande

I told Nathan to delete all his pictures off his camera because I thought they had uploaded to my computer. I checked today and I was wrong... whoops. This was after the "are you positive i can delete them off my camera. 'yessss i'm positive'" conversation. Hopefully he will get that message, but if it were me I would have deleted them by now to clear for Chile. I'm a terrible girlfriend...

Nathan!

Nathan came yesterday! :) :)

It is so surreal seeing him here in the Galapagos. I could barely kiss him, I had to keep pushing him away to make sure it was him and not some typical Ecuadorian homeboy. Ahhh! He's here!!

I saw him right when he got off the plane - for one thing, the airports in the islands have to walls. And another - he's so white he was blinding everyone. so cute.

Enough of my gushing - we got here and he immediately (and obviously) befriended everyone in the program and even some islanders. I have to go to my class because it is for my major and missing one class is like missing two weeks of class at Emmanuel. Anyway, i got out of class and walked across the street to the beach and Nate is playing frisbee with some Ecuadorians. So we all got a game of ultimate frisbee (Galapagos style in terms of the rules - "nuestra!") and played until the sun set. We went to dinner and I made him try ceviche - a weird sounding yet delicious 'soup' - it is served cold, usually with seafood and mixed with fresh veggies and served with banana chips. mmm. Then we drank with the locals on the pier and went to one of two bars here on the islands. Ahh :) A fun first day.

The pirates came and called it hell

Buenas.
Much to update on.

I left you at carnival - popular 4 day celebration before lent begins and it's celebrated differently around the world. In the Galapagos, people pelt passersby with eggs, water guns, paint, shaving cream, etc.

I wasn't able to participate too much in the celebrations because during the prime of them we had class. Class ends a week early but it's more intense during the weeks we do have it. I did manage, however, to be attacked with lipstick by the locals when I walked outside for a break during class.

... whammy! After I got most of it off.

The professor that I have now for evolution is actually the codirector of GAIAS and we have to be on our best behavior and work our very hardest. It's the evolution section - the one that I wanted the most! - and of course, it totally sucks. All math. Horribly thick accent, I would probably get more out of it if he just taught in spanish. Nothing interesting, nothing I will retain. To make up for that letdown, I've been doing my own reading and research, which has been my absolute favorite thing to do. Evolution is crazy and complicated and incredibly disorganized. It's crazy to think that we all just as easily could have not existed. And, obviously, I couldn't be in a more perfect environment.

So we went on a field trip on Saturday around San Cristobal.

First we went to Leon Dormido ('sleeping lion'), or Kicker Rock as it's called in english. It's these two giant rocks that are a ways off the coast of the island. As you know, the islands were formed by volcanos, and when that happens, there is a lot of pressure. So rocks jutting off from the main island are like little offchutes of all that pressure. Pretty bright red algae covers the rocks and there are lots of tropical fish, starfish, and... *gulp*... sharks. I swam with sharks! The visibility at Leon Dormido was terrible so we couldn't see that far below us, which makes it a little scary. Sharks are my number one fear and I think that's pretty rational. Sharks kill things all the time. They have scary sharp teeth. They are bigger than me. ...Rational. So when I jumped in the water and checked out the big blue below my flippers, seeing the silouhette of sharks lurking a couple meters below me freaked me out a bit. A lot a bit. It's crazy being scared in the water - being a land creature, you aren't in your element at all and there really is nowhere you can go if something comes after you. I don't really remember being scared like that at home. So I tried exploring for sharks a bit but pretty much stuck to the algae and the fish. Call me a baby, but I'm not worried about it. I choose life.

Then we went to Punta Pitt for a hike. It's still part of San Cristobal. This is where the pirates landed, and upon looking at all the semi-desert plantlife - prickly thorns, cactuses, black serpent lizards (marine iguanas), and giant black basalt rocks - called the Galapagos 'hell on earth'. If only they had spent some time looking around, right?

The photo to the left is right when you get off the beach. Those rocks are all volcanic ash and very easily eroded. We wented hiking for a while and we came to the photo on your left. I can't just over the top and around the corner of that area is the lush jungle-like parts like El Junco with the miconia bushes and the banana and coconut trees. We saw some red footed boobies and Nazca boobies.

Boobies and sex - Now, I bet you are wondering what's the difference between red footed boobies and blue footed boobies and Nazca boobies. That would be sexual selection and siblicide.

Blue footed boobies use their brightly colored blue feet to show off to potential mates (thus their bobo dance). The brightness of the blue are indicators of health, and women like to picky the really healthy ones to mate with.

Red footed boobies are also sexually selective, but they evolved a little differently on different islands and instead of using brightly colored feet, they use markings on their faces. So they have normal, reddish orange feet but they are still of the booby genus.

Nazca boobies aren't so much sexually selective as they are brutal. They participate in obligate siblicide, and I'll explain that from the beginning.Mom lays 2 eggs, one big & one small. Eggs hatch several days apart, larger one first. Older, bigger chick pushes younger sibling outside of nest under the supervision of Mom. Younger chick peeps for mom's attention and gets eaten by frigate bird/mockingbird/just sits there dying while Mom ignores. Crazy right? The moms let that happen because they would be exerting themselves so much trying to care for 2 chicks rather than one and they wouldn't be able to participate in the next reproductive season. And they favor long term reproductive success.

Thanks for letting me geek out!

Last place we went to was isla lobos, where we snorkeled and played with sea lions. They literally played with you! They blow bubbles in your face, swim around you, there are pretty fish, I got knocked into a large rock and now have the bruise the size of a modest watermelon on my upper thigh, there was a sizeable shark so we all had to band together..... good times.

La vida

A few instances of the everyday life on the island.


Pilsener -


Pilsener is the only beer in Ecuador. I'm almost kidding. There's another beer called Club, (pronounced Clooooob, it was the most popular beer tenish years ago) and another called brama or something, which is popular in a few south american countries. Well anyway, it's a pale wheat ale and in the beginning, I was in disbelief that I would only be drinking one type of beer for 5 months, but it's grown on me for sure. Aaannnd, it's only $2.50 for 24oz of Pilsener! Wahhooo for my budget! Also, the style of Ecuadorian drinking is a lot more communal than that of the states. People buy a couple of beers at a time and a few people have glasses. The glasses and beers both get passed around and people share and talk and the beer stays cold (no stale, warm last sips of beer) and there's no conflict over what kind of beer to share because there is only one kind at the bars. That's definitely something I want to do at home with my friends :)

Mopeds -

Mopeds are big here on the island, as they should be. One interesting thing about mopeds is that entire families ride them at once, include infants and pets. I've seen a moped with parents a small child, an infant, and a puppy mopedding around the island. If mopedding was a verb. I actually will work on getting a picture of that because I'm sure that I'll never see it again once I leave.

American mothers would be shitting their pants realizing what kind of child saftey exists in vehicles here... (which is none) Frequently you will see pick up trucks with the kids horsing around in the back, suburbans with kids jumping around, no seatbelts, mothers holding infants in the front seat, etc etc etc. But here, there is no car insurance. So, when people get into accidents, they are immediately incarcerated until they can prove that they can pay for the damage of the accident. So, drivers may seem crazy, but there is a lot of beeping going on in the streets of the mainland because everyone needs to let each other know what they are doing and what's going on. Also, interesting fact... if someone is pulled over on a bridge, you cannot pass them for any reason. If their car is broken down, you have to wait until they get it towed. I have nightmares that I'm driving in Ecuador and I get into an accident and then I just have to chill in jail until my parents realize I should have been home already.



Taxis -

Chevorlet is doing a project on the islands - they've provided a bunch of white trucks to all the inhabited islands and we basically can go anywhere we want around town for a dollar, and then to the highlands for 15 bucks. Sweet deal. I don't remember exactly what the promotion was for, but surely it has to do with the environment and conserving all the endemic species.

We all ride in the back of the pick ups, mainly because it's a few thousand degrees in the equatorial sun and the breeze keeps us alive. But also because it's awesome and fun and absolutely illegal in America. Riding through the highlands in the back of a pick up is one of my favorite things to do here. The vegetation zones change from semi-arid to straight up jungle complete with banana trees, coffee trees, avocado trees, guayabana trees...

Passing people in the street -
Married men/bachelor men/especially teenaged young men give you a few times over and say "holaaa mamacita, te quiero, como te llamas, you're sexxyyyy"
But everyone else just smiles and says hola, little kids say "Hi How Are You" in English and then giggle and run away.
Some people are annoyed by all the gringos in town but most of them are used to it.

Politics

Every Friday and Saturday there have been political rallies, all inhabited islands have to elect a governer. This means that every friday and saturday, right outside my house, there have been parties going on until say, 4 or 5 in the morning. I mean, hey, I like to party. I like latin music. I can get my groove on. It's just that they pick a song - one song - to be their campaign song, usually a popular song from 8 years ago that they change the lyrics to - and then they play this song on repeat from about 9 at night to 4 in the morning. Uhhhmmmm... So anyway, the governer now is named Zapata and hearsay tells me he got caught shark finning this past year, a highly illegal and environmentally destructive activity that will end up hurting the tourism industry in the Galapagos, an industry which is their main source of income. And he wants to full on populate San Cristobal, which will destroy everything. Everyone educated wants to light Zapata on fire and throw him into a barrel of Amazonian gasoline, but the truth of the matter is that many people on the islands are not educated and he will likely be reelected. For now, we will just have to enjoy the free cana liquor he passes out at the rallies...

I have bad news, and then good news and bad news again

Let me tell you about my life since Wednesday. Keeping in mind that this is finals week, so I have a field report, 2 research papers, a final exam and a presentation over the course over the next two days. Excellent.

BAD NEWS - I woke up, wolfed down breakfast and ran to school so that I wouldn't be late for the field trip. We were learning data collection techniques - plant cover - interesting stuff like that - in the boiling equatorial sun. I was nauseuous but didn't want to be a baby because *gulp* my newfound girl crush decided to come on the field trip with us because *swoon* she's studying botany... So not only did I hustle getting my stuff done (yeah right... when she wasn't looking I was laying in the shade of the miconia bushes we were supposed to be examining) but when we biked back I hauled ass up this steep hill that was in the beginning of our ride (immediately collapsing at the top of the hill, exhausted and wanting to barf and being completely winded for the rest of the way back... Becky had a pretty good laugh at that). Then we got back to the uni and I felt like I was on the verge of spontaneous combustion so I jumped in the water. Didn't cool me down, still felt nauseous, but girlcrush was taking a swim too so I played it cool. Then we walked a shadeless walk to grab some lunch, but as I was on fire and feeling nauseous, I just had a couple glasses of juice and headed home for a quick siesta before I began etching away at the mountains of work I had in store for the evening. I tried sleeping for an hour or so, but I decided that it must be about 200 degrees outside so I took a cold shower and went back to lay down but couldn't fall asleep.
Then it happend. And it happend for the next 36 hours. I'll spare you the details, to get an idea, I want you to remember the last time you got food poisoning and now I want you to multiply that by Ecuador.
My host mother was so worried that she checked on me every hour bringing me tea and crackers and food that just made me sick looking at, but she was really sweet the whole time. She just kept getting flustered and wanting to bring me to the hospital but I figured an Ecuadorian hospital might be a bit counterproductive. Then (awww) the little girl, Genesis, went to the store and got me an apple gatorade (1. - yeah, apple gatorade, weird. 2. in a glass bottle - why ecuadorians put their sports drinks in glass bottles i will never understand) which I drank a sip of and no sooner did she walk down the stairs but I accidentally smashed it on the floor. I tried cleaning THAT up but I couldn't sit up so I went back to sleep. When I woke up, there was broken glass and cockroaches all over my floor! Talk about a nightmare. So I took another cold shower and fell asleep on the floor of my balcony because it was colder outside, a terrible desicion from which I still have a stiff neck.
To top it off, my awesome professor wasn't accepting late field reports and it was due in the morning. So I walked back to the uni to get some work done. I threw up in the bathroom when I got there and decided it wasn't a good idea. I walked home. On my walk back, I took a different route that I thought was shorter (not always a smart experiment) and walked by a yard with a bunch of realllly adorable husky puppies. mmm.
TIME FOR THE GOOD NEWS : So on Thursday, I woke up and felt better. I couldn't keep anything down, but I didn't feel nauseous and I could walk around and stuff. I went downstairs to sit with my family while they ate and to say thanks for taking care of me and stuff. And in my living room was none other than one of those husky puppies. So I thought about that.
Thoughts:
" walked by someones yard and there were four husky puppies - 4 is my favorite number and husky puppies are my favorite puppy - SO when i wake up this morning and find a husky puppy in my living room, it's God's way of saying.... 'I'm sorry that you shit your pants and vomited all night and you had cockroaches all over your floor, here's a husky puppy' "

Genesis put an orange tee shirt on him (huskies must get pretty cold here in the Galapagos) and named him LouLou.

AND AGAIN FOR THE BAD NEWS: stupid owner came to get the puppy while i was at school.

Guitos

Hola amigos.

We saw the galapagos tortoises. weee!

We went on a Friday, which was awesome, because they have feeding days on M/W/F. The rest of the days, they fend for themselves for food, so that they learn to find their own resources and not be totally dependent on the Galapaguera volunteers. The above picture is of two turtles fighting over some leaves. Awww. They can get pretty aggressive. After I took this picture they were rockin each others shells for a while.

There is this tree called 'manzanillo' on the islands (poison apple tree) - it's indigenous to the Galapagos and it's incredibly poisonous - you pretty much get the worst hives of your life all over your body. Someone from our program got it pretty bad and almost had to go home... kind of scary because they are unmarked and everywhere -but they don't take them down because 1. they are endemic and 2. they provide food & habitat for other endemic species.

So the Galapaguera is absolutely covered in manzanillos because thats what the tortugos eat! We were dodging poison left and right.

There is a little cage for the baby tortugitos that they live in all the time. They are so tiny! They need a pretty tight cage though because rats (invasive species!) are eating them at night. Humans first brought rats over in the 1800s and they have proceeded to decrease populations of everything cool. People inadvertantly ruin everything! gah.

Highlands trip!

Heinke, my botany professor, has been pushing her luck. She has that whole, I'm from Germany/I don't shave my pits/I have the coolest jewelry you've ever seen thing going for her, but she has been too much from the beginning. I am sitting here in the Galapagos islands doing more work over the course of three days than I ever care to in a semester. To top it off, everyone failed her quiz and she complained to administration that we were stupid. Sorry, Heinke. But not really. Because your lectures suck.

So instead of celebrating Darwin's 200th birthday with all of San Cristobal, we were hiking in the highlands and doing an educational field trip examining plants or whatever. If it weren't probably the coolest thing that I've done so far on this island, I would have thrown her off the top of the volcano and named all the vegetation zones that she would have been rollin on through... Not really though! She is actually kind of cool and hardcore, which I appreciate. I would just rather have her as my friend than as my professor.

On to the amazing stuff!

So we went on a bus and headed on up to El junco near the top of the volcano. I don't know if I've ever mentioned this before, but riding on a bus up a volcano is probably the most fun, dangerous, and motion-sickness inducing experience ever. It's like being on a roller coaster that someone has been decapitated on before. We did it a lot in Quito and I felt mostly like I was going to die, or that we would get stuck in the mud, or we would just rock too much to the right and tumble on down the volcano and explode at the bottom. On the way there, the vegetation changed completely.

In town, where I live, is very close to a beach and it is pretty populated. The zones that I live in are the littoral (coastal) zones and the arid zone which is a bit higher up. So, the vegetation is mostly low trees, cactuses, stuff like that. But when you travel higher, there are different moisture/percipitation levels and that paired with the elevation and that equals amazing jungle like environment complete with lagoons and waterfalls and tall trees and stuff. And it is away from civilization. The Charles Darwin Foundation is doing research scattered all over the place - due to habitat destruction, introduced/invasive species, and the overexploitation of resources, there are species here that are reaching critically low population levels and they do what they can to lessen the blow of human disturbance. There are nurseries all over the place for indigenous plant species so that they can repopulate the area. Here is a picture of the nurseries. Aww.

The huge problem on the Galapagos is the mora, or the blackberry. It is an invasive specie, which means that it spreads quickly on its own and outcompetes the native and endemic species for resources. Volunteers have been trying to eradicate the mora in certain areas, all done by hand. They are starting a sustainable program this October that eradicates the mora and makes marmalade out of the berries at the same time to sell to tourists. Las moras son muy ricas :) mmmm. We ate them throughout our hike. Speaking of eating delicious island fruit, in April and May I am going hiking in the highlands every day because that's fruit season! There are going to be Galapagos guayabas (I have to take a picture of this fruit, so delicious yet so, so weird) and naranjas and bananas and passionfruits mmm. We can just pick them off the trees as we walk. Below is a banana tree and that weird dark red thing is it's flower! It's one of the only plant species whose fruits grow up from it's flower. :) P.S. Bananas are not indigenous to the Galapagos!

So after walking around for a little bit we went back in the bus to the tippity top area to see the powerplant windmills. Yeah! Ecuadorians for alternative energy! It's awesome. There are three windmills now, they are strategically placed on a certain point (there was another windier spot but they were unable to put them there because they would disrupt the frigate bird nests). They are 51 meters high (oooooo) and it provides 40% of the energy for San Cristobal (aaahhhh).

Here are Becky and I being ridiculous near the windmills. Sorry I don't have a picture of those. They look like regular alternative energy windmills.

THEN we went to el junco. I am just going to copy and paste a chunk from my field report and tell you about that -

El junco is a fresh lake in the highlands of San Cristobal and is the only naturally formed fresh water area on all of the Galapagos Islands. This lake is evidence that there were once glaciers on San Cristobal. There was debate on whether or not the lake was retrieving water from the ocean, but through a mold demonstration, researchers were able to prove that it does not. El junco always has fresh water, even during serious droughts. This may be because the area has a lot of moisture and water is constantly cycling via evaporation and precipitation.
Recently, the introduced fish species telapia was found in the lake, numbering at about 40,000. The fish, most popularly raised through aquaculture, is an omnivore usually fed only algae. However, in El junco, the telapia were feeding off of the crustaceans that were living in the lake and it was decided that they should be eradicated. So, researchers extracted a poison from the roots of barbascos, a tree found in the Amazon. Because they wanted to leave the crustaceans unharmed, researchers tested the crustacean’s reactions to the poison over a three month period. They decided that the barbasco poison harmed only the fish in the lake, and were able to remove the species.
The area surrounding the lake was once covered by the invasive blackberry species that have recently been removed by hand by volunteers. Also, there are plots located in the area with patches of miconia in order to test how feasible it would be to grow the native miconia. There needs to be more species richness so that invaders do not take over the area.
From this view, we were able to see a couple of greenhouses in the lower vegetation zones. Greenhouses are reducing the amount of insects, are able to grow food all year round, and in turn lessening the Galapagueñan dependency on mainland shipments of tomatoes and other staples. There are eleven greenhouses on Santa Cruz, two on Floreana, and two on San Cristobal with three on the way.

Then we went to a campground which was a really neat set up, but it was too dark out by that time to take any cool pictures. We had a campfire and talked about the ghost stories and legends of san cristobal. Heinke (my professor) and her partner John shared with us some of their own really freaky ghost stories. She believes in ghosts! I think that's so weird and really cool at the same time because she is a scientist. To be spiritual and to be scientific is a happy medium. A few of us wandered away from the campfire and checked out the stars. This is one of the things I was so excited for! I am away from the mainland, away from society and pop culture and tall buildings with light pollution - and here are the stars, the brightest and clearest I have ever seen them. All the constellations are different - I can see all of Orien and I have to really look for the Big Dipper but the rest are pretty much different. We are going to try to learn them while we are here. We laid down in the grass for a good while and Scott led us through a guided meditation, which always makes me wish that my entire life was one giant guided meditation. It was an amazing day!